The Trib Editorial Board is Misleading You. Again.

A couple of (at best) misleads in today's Tribune-Review.

From the editorial page of course:

The safety net against fraud and abuse in Social Security disability insurance payments is meaningless if the judges who rule in these matters more often than not simply pass the buck. That's among findings in an inspector general's report, which found that approval of “questionable” payments over the past seven years added up to $2 billion.

The analysis, requested by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the Government Oversight and Reform Committee, shows 44 administrative law judges (ALJs) with especially high rates of benefit approval wrongfully doled out millions to 24,900 applicants. That amounts to $45 million in alleged waste per judge, reports Rachel Greszler for The Daily Signal.

I'm not sure you caught the first very subtly hidden mislead there.  It's in the last sentence.  The last three words, in fact:

The Daily Signal

What is The Daily Signal, you might ask? Take a look at the webpage and then scroll all the way down to the bottom.  Find the link called About The Daily Signal.  If you click on it, you'll find this about half way down the page:

More and more people are grabbing bites of news from mobile devices on the go—and they need a place where they can find digestible, trusted news on the most important policy debate of the day.

That’s why the Heritage Foundation team created a digital-first, multimedia news platform called The Daily Signal.

There it is - Heritage Foundation. Now why would the Tribune-Review feel that you might not want to know that this info is from the Heritage Foundation?  Could it be the very old and very deep financial associations between the two?

Yea, that's my guess, as well.

But back to Ms Greszler's Heritage Foundation analysis.  You can see where the Braintrust gets its data when you read the first paragraph of the analysis:

More than $2 billion in “questionable” payments was paid out to nearly 25,000 Disability Insurance (DI) recipients, according to a recent report by the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Office of the Inspector General. The report states that 44 Administrative Law Judges (ALJs) with particularly high numbers of decisions and high rates of benefit approval were responsible for wrongfully doling out the $2 billion in DI benefits to 24,900 individuals over the past seven years. On a per-judge basis, that’s $45 million in wasted taxpayer dollars, not including each ALJ’s annual salary of up to $167,000.

Ok, so here's the interesting part.  The links in the above were all taken from the original.  The second one (on the ALJ's salaries) works but the first one (on the report) doesn't.

Doesn't matter.  I found it anyway.

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it's just a html glitch and not an attempt to hide the real report from you, the Trib's loyal readers.

But what does the report say, anyway?  Let's take a look at the summary. Here's what OIG was asked to do:

In a January 2014 letter, the Chairmen of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Health Care, and Entitlements asked us to identify ALJs who had 700 or more dispositions and allowance rates of 85 percent or higher in any 2 fiscal years (FY) from FYs 2007 through 2013.

After we identified the group of ALJs, the Chairmen asked us to review a sample of these ALJs’ allowances to determine whether the ALJs processed the cases according to Social Security Administration (SSA) policy. Finally, the Chairmen asked us to determine how SSA monitors the ALJ outliers and discuss any subsequent actions resulting from this monitoring.

And this is what they found (now pay attention):

Overall, we found that 44 ALJs (about 4 percent of the ALJs at the Agency) met the outlier criteria. We estimate that 38 of the 275 sample cases related to these 44 ALJs should not have been allowed. We also found the number of ALJ outliers and cases with quality issues had decreased in recent years, at a time when the Agency has increased monitoring and oversight of ALJ workloads.

Wow.  You would not have even guessed, after reading Greszler's analysis, that 44 ALJs are just 4% of the total number of ALJs, would you?  Or that only about 14% of the 275 sample cases they found shouldn't have been allowed.  Or that the report she's citing says that the "outliers" have decreased in recent years during a time of increased monitoring and oversight.

But what about the numbers?  The Trib braintrust says that those:

...“questionable” payments over the past seven years added up to $2 billion.

And Greszler says:

More than $2 billion in “questionable” payments was paid out to nearly 25,000 Disability Insurance (DI) recipients, according to a recent report by the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Office of the Inspector General.

What does the report say? Something slightly different:

From this feedback a review of earlier remand outcomes for these ALJs, we estimated that 38 of the 275 sample cases would have been denied or dismissed had they been part of a pre-effectuation review. Extrapolating these results to all the allowances by the 44 outlier ALJs over a 7-year period, we estimate they improperly allowed disability benefits on approximately 24,900 cases, resulting in questionable costs of about $2 billion.

Well, would you look at that. It was an estimate.

Sloppy work on the part of Heritage and the Trib's braintrust.  All they would have had to say is that the OIG estimated, based on an extrapolation of the results of 4% of the ALJs and 14% of a sampling of 275 cases, that there were improper payments of about $2 billion over 7 years.

By the way, did you note which 7 years would that be?  From the summary, we learn that it's 2007 to 2013.

From the report itself we learn:

We found that the number of outlier ALJs who met our criteria had decreased annually since FY 2009. While 32 ALJs met the criteria in FY 2009, the number decreased to 7 in FY 2013. (pg 7)

Hmm...tell me again what happened in 2009? Wasn't there a change of administration that took place early in that year, say in January?  And doesn't the report say that because of greater oversight the number of "outlier" ALJs decrease after 2009?

Wouldn't it have been soooo enlightening to have read that in Greszler's analysis at Heritage or the braintrust's editorial board press release.

It took me about an hour to research and write the above.  Maybe 90 minutes.  How was it that I was able to find the truth when either Rachel Greszler or the PR firm on the Trib editorial board, couldn't?

Either they missed something they shouldn't have OR they caught it and decided not to tell you anyway.

So which is it, incompetence or dishonesty?

More On Schwab's Ruling (As Viewed By The Trib)

My friends on the Tribune-Review editorial board published this this morning:

U.S. District Judge Arthur Schwab, sitting in Pittsburgh, has taken considerable heat in some legal circles for ruling that parts of President Barack Obama's deportation amnesty are unconstitutional. The rap against Tuesday's ruling is that it has little or no practical effect because it came in a technically unrelated criminal deportation case. Nonetheless, Judge Schwab's finding stings: “President Obama's unilateral legislative action violates the separation of powers provided for in the United States Constitution as well as the Take Care Clause, and therefore is unconstitutional.” Credit the judge for having the guts to say so. And look for his legal rationale to be part of the eventual Supreme Court ruling that Mr. Obama truly is a constitutional reprobate. [Bolding in original]

While the braintrust acknowledges "the rap" about the ruling ("that it has little or no practical effect"), you should note that they don't come out and agree with that point.  They do, however, agree with the finding.

Which is odd, considering how one of their own sources on Constitutional Law, Ilya Somin, a libertarian (he's an Adjunct Scholar at the Scaife-funded Cato Institute) lawyer writing at Volokh Conspiracy seems to disagree:

Today’s federal district court decision striking down President Obama’s executive order on immigration has serious flaws. Strikingly, Judge Arthur Schwab attempts to dispose of a complex and important constitutional issue in just three or four pages. In the process, he ignores important weaknesses in his position.

And more damaging to the braintrust's argument:

If the Supreme Court were to adopt Judge Schwab’s reasoning, federal law enforcement agencies would be barred from issuing general systematic guidelines about how their officials should exercise prosecutorial discretion. The exercise of discretion would then become arbitrary and capricious. Alternatively, perhaps they could still follow systematic policies, so long as those policies were not formally declared and announced to the public, as the president’s order was. Neither possibility is particularly attractive, and neither is required by the Constitution.

In fact at Reason.com, Somin out right states:

In reality, Obama’s actions were well within the scope of executive authority under the Constitution. In a world where authorities can prosecute only a small fraction of lawbreakers, all presidents inevitably make policy choices about which violations of federal law to prosecute and which to ignore. Such choices are inevitably affected by policy preferences. Obama’s decision to defer deportation is in line with those of past presidents.

Can't these guys get their stories straight?

NOW They're Relying On Peer-Reviewed Science??

Take a look at this from the Tribune-Review:

Separating climate fact from opinion is the focus of a free-market think tank's lawsuit against the White House science office over a video asserting that last winter's bone-chilling polar vortex originated from climate change.

In its lawsuit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is demanding documents related to the video, featuring White House science czar John Holdren blaming the bitter cold on climate change, contrary to peer-reviewed studies, The Daily Caller reports. In the video Mr. Holdren says the extreme weather “is a pattern that we can expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.”

While Holdren's statement isn't an “outright lie,” it's a “half-truth and even a stretch at that,” according to two scientists with the Cato Institute.

Let us, as they say, unpack this.

First the Scaife money the Trib's braintrust never gets around to mentioning:

• $2.2 million to Cato
• $3.9 million to CEI

Imagine what would happen if the Block Family (they own the P-G) were to donate such funds to, say, Mediamatters and then cite some mediamatters research.  I am sure the braintrust would be screaming all the way to Brent Bozell's front door.

But back to the second paragraph.  did you see it?  Did you see how they're "debunking" Holdren?  I'll give you the sentence again with the appropriate emphasis:

In its lawsuit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) is demanding documents related to the video, featuring White House science czar John Holdren blaming the bitter cold on climate change, contrary to peer-reviewed studies...

Yea those "peer-reviewed studies" would probably be included in these "peer-reviewed studies" - you know the ones.  They're the "peer-reviewed" studies that show that 97% of climate scientists affirm the existence of climate change.

And yet our friends on the braintrust have the audacity to still cling to this:

After CEI petitioned for a correction, the White House acknowledged that Holdren's statement was “personal opinion” and exempt from data quality laws, The Hill newspaper reports. So much for the administration's “settled science.” [Emphasis added.]

Fact of the matter is, it's probably too early to link last year's polar vortex to climate change (in fact Holdren starts the video by saying that no single event can either prove or disprove global climate change) but using the peer-reviewed science that supports climate change as a way to try to undermine that same science is simply laughable.

And it shows either a shocking disregard for science, if they believe it's an adequate argument) or a shocking disdain for their audience, f the Tribune-Review's editorial board thinks it can fake them out so blatantly.

So which is it, guys?  Are you just ignorant or are you assuming your audience is?

Follow The Money - Some Scaife Updates

From Rich Lord at the P-G:

Three foundations that Richard Mellon Scaife long guided are heading into a season of leadership changes, reorganizations and dramatic expansions three months after the filing of the late billionaire’s will.

Nearly doubling in size is the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which Mr. Scaife, son of the philanthropy’s namesake, turned into a national force in funding the development of conservative thought. That foundation is expected to absorb the smaller, similarly focused Carthage Foundation.

Then there's this:

The Sarah Scaife Foundation has “been responsible for a lot of national public policy for the conservative movement, in particular the work done by the Heritage Foundation, and in Pennsylvania the work done by the Commonwealth Foundation and the Allegheny Institute [for Public Policy],” said Allegheny County Republican Committee chairman Jim Roddey.

The merger of the Carthage Foundation and the terms of Mr. Scaife’s will portend “more grants and … a bigger scope,” said Mr. Roddey, who is on the Sarah Scaife Foundation’s board.

Did you know that Jim Roddey was also once on the board of the Allegheny Institute?

Yes, he was.  Small world.  Lotsa Scaife money supporting lotsa conservative causes.

But while the Sarah Scaife Foundation's getting bigger - meaning there's be more money for the Heritage Foundation, AEI and so on - this is also occurring:

The two children of Richard Mellon Scaife have demanded, in court filings last week, an accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars that they said was drained from a trust to cover the losses of the Tribune-Review newspapers, despite the trustees’ duty to preserve funds for them.

Jennie Scaife, of Palm Beach, Fla., and David N. Scaife, of Shadyside, filed similar petitions in Orphans Court of Allegheny County. They claimed that three trustees who controlled $210 million in 2005 let that dwindle to nothing by the time of their father’s death, four months ago.

And:

The petitions suggest deep divisions between, on one hand, Richard Mellon Scaife’s children, and, on the other, the handful of close associates managing his estate, estimated to be in the billion-dollar range. Richard Mellon Scaife did not mention the children in his will, which split most of his wealth between two foundations.

Now obviously, I have no info other than these two articles in the P-G, and it'll probably be years before this is resolved, but it looks as though Scaife drained one trust (one that he shouldn't have) to fund his Tribune-Review, reserving the rest of his vast wealth to be passed on to the three (or two, now that Carthage has been folded into Sarah Scaife) Foundations that support Scaife's political causes.

Why couldn't he use his own money to prop up the obvious financial failure that is his Tribune-Review?

There's something vastly distasteful about all that.

And Now...A Message From The Pentagon

A few days ago the Post-Gazette editorial board published this:

Conservative members of Congress may not be ready to acknowledge the reality of climate change, but the Pentagon sees it for what it is — a threat to national security.

On Monday, the Pentagon issued a report assessing the immediate dangers of climate change.

And here's the report itself.

And this is from Secretary Hagel's forward:

The responsibility of the Department of Defense is the security of our country. That requires thinking ahead and planning for a wide range of contingencies.

Among the future trends that will impact our national security is climate change. Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict. They will likely lead to food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, and destruction by natural disasters in regions across the globe.

And so on.

While the other, smaller, and far more ideological (in this case rightwing) paper in town, the Tribune-Review did reprint this AP piece that said:

The report — described as a Pentagon road map — identifies four things that it says will affect the military: rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, more extreme weather and rising sea levels. It calls on the department and the military services to identify more specific concerns, including possible effects on the more than 7,000 bases and facilities, and to start putting plans in place to deal with them.

More broadly, the report warns that as temperatures rise and severe weather increases, food, water and electricity shortages could cause instability in many countries, spreading disease, causing mass migration and opening the door for extremists to take advantage of fractures in unstable countries.

However, our friends on the Trib's editorial board are still looking to disprove the science with this:

Wattsupwiththat.com , which bills itself as “the world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change,” says the water temperature of the Great Lakes is more than 6 degrees colder than last year at this time and 3 degrees colder than normal. Experts say should the trend continue, the lakes could freeze over earlier. And that could impair Great Lakes shipping. This global warming stuff is getting ridiculous.

So, I guess, because a rightwing science denying website says the Great Lakes are warmer this year than last year the Pentagon has to be wrong,

Hmm...ponder that for a bit because that's what the braintrust wants you to believe.

The Tribune-Review Misguides Its Readers On Climate Change. Again.

Today, the editorial board of the The Tribune-Review added this sentence to its Sunday Pops page:

Scholars at the Heartland Institute report that the global mean surface temperature of the Earth has not risen now for 18 straight years. We report, you deride — the climate-cluckers. [Bolding in Original.]

The implication is clear: no more warming!  But look closer at the sentence - "global mean surface temperature" has not risen.  Is the mean surface temperature the only way to gauge global warming?

No, it isn't.  But we've been down this road before, haven't we?

So, with your indulgence, O Gentle Reader, I'd like to trace this story through the climate denier distortion machine.  First we look to Heartland.  What do they say about this?

We get a clue from this page:

According to satellite data released this month by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), which provides data used by NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation, the global mean surface temperature has not risen for 18 consecutive years. This extends the so-called “pause” in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Ah. Now we have a NASA source for the data - Remote Sensing Systems. More on that in a bit.  But if you look at the title of that page, it's obvious that it's a follow up to an earlier page - it's a "comment on" sort of thing.

Here's the original "reporting" at Heartland:

According to Professor John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama/Huntsville, October 1 marked the 18th anniversary of no warming as measured by Earth’s climate satellite system. Despite a continued and marked rise in emissions and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, Earth’s temperature has plateaued for the past 18 years.

Christy told CNS News, “That’s basically a fact. There’s not much to comment on.”

(There's a link to this CNS News piece on Christy at the bottom of the page.)  So wait, so this isn't from Heartland?  It's only passing through the Conservative/Libertarian think tank from another right wing "news" source?  Why didn't the Tribune-Review tell us that?

Do I need to mention that CNS News is owned by the Media Research Council and about the financial links between the late Richard Mellon Scaife and his Tribune-Review and his stake in MRC/CNS News?

But besides all that (which frankly is enough to erase any credibility the braintrust has in this matter), what does Remote Sensing Systems actually have to say about the global mean surface temperatures?

Take a look. Here's how they summarize their findings:

• Over the past 35 years, the troposphere has warmed significantly. The global average temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.13 degrees Kelvin per decade (0.23 degrees F per decade).
• Climate models cannot explain this warming if human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are not included as input to the model simulation.
• he spatial pattern of warming is consistent with human-induced warming. See Santer et al 2008, 2009, 2011, and 2012 for more about the detection and attribution of human induced changes in atmospheric temperature using MSU/AMSU data.[Link in Original]

Then they add their "But...:

• The troposphere has not warmed as fast as almost all climate models predict.

Wait. Not warmed as fast?  But Heartland said that according to RSS data, the warming stopped!  The Trib braintrust dutifully echoed and amplified Heartland and said it "hasn't risen" in 18 years!  But the folks they're all telling us about told a different story, didn't they?

Interesting how that happens in the well funded right wing news/noise machine, huh?

Meanwhile the warming's still going on - in the oceans and not on the surface.

The Right Wing Noise Machine vs Climate Science. Again

From today's Tribune-Review:

The New York Times went full-tilt boogie in its front-page coverage of “legions of demonstrators frustrated by international inaction on global warming” descending on the Big Apple on Sunday, even devoting eight photos to the rally.

And that would be a legion of over 310,000, by the way.

A march that the Trib has decided not to cover, by the way, though it did post this piece from USAToday:

The one-day [UN] summit, preceded by a historic march that drew tens of thousands of climate activists to Manhattan streets on Sunday, occurs as scientists report that global greenhouse gas emissions rose 2.3 percent last year to record levels. In the United States, despite several recent years of decline, they rose 2.9 percent.

So while that's in the Trib, they editorialize with this:

As Steven Koonin, a former Obama administration undersecretary for science in the Energy Department, offered in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, “there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing the human influence” on climate.

Yea, they also left out that Koonin at least as late as 2007 was the "Chief Scientist" for British Petroleum.

Gee, they put in that he was an undersecretary for Science under the Obama administration but left out that he was a Chief Scientist for British Petroleum.  I wonder why.

And they're still trying to play the "no consensus" card?  Why?  From BillMoyers.com:

The most important thing to understand about the scientific consensus that human activities are causing the earth to warm is that it isn’t a result of peer pressure or someone policing scientists’ opinions. It results from the scientific method.

“Scientists are very interested in theories that other factors may be causing climate change,” says John Abraham. “The contrarians put forward ideas and the consensus scientists investigate them honestly and find that they don’t withstand scientific scrutiny. This happens all the time. That’s how science works. In fact, showing that these guys are wrong makes the science better.”

A scientific consensus emerges when the weight of evidence for a proposition becomes so great that serious researchers stop arguing about it among themselves. They then move on to study and debate other questions. There’s quite a bit of scientific debate about lots of different aspects of climate change, but the question of whether humans are causing the planet to warm isn’t one of them.

There have been three studies, using different methodologies, that have shown that almost all working climate scientists — 97 percent — accept the consensus view.

So simply saying "no consensus" doesn't really mean there's no consensus.

But we already knew that.

The Trib Editorial Board Botches The Facts. Again.

Boy did the Braintrust get this one wrong.  From today's Tribune-Review editorial page:

The Obama administration is mum on why, in 2012, it began requiring gun buyers to declare their ethnicity and race. But its gun-grabbing, politics-first nature should make reasonable people suspect the worst.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives amended its Form 4773, the required record of firearms purchases, to make buyers check two boxes for their ethnicity and race, reports The Washington Times. One box asks if buyers are Hispanic, Latino or not. A second box asks if buyers are Indian, Asian, black, Pacific Islander or white. Dealers can be shut down if buyers don't check off both. [Emphasis added.]

And then a few paragraphs later:

Around the time the form changed, the administration was citing flows of U.S.-sold weapons to violent Mexican drug gangs during a gun-control push and requiring Southwest border-state dealers to report multiple rifle sales.

So, was the change implemented in an attempt to better track gun runners and straw purchases? Or was it an intentional effort to trip up legitimate gun dealers and close them? And what of the mass copying?

Americans deserve a full explanation.

Here is the Washington Times piece they're referencing.

So what's the problem?  Take a look at this version of Form 4773.  It's from 2008.  Here, I'll even post the important part:

And here's how it looks now:

In 2008 there was one box to fill.  In 2012 there were two.  Both forms asking for the same information.  So how can a revised 2012 form begin something that was already in place at least 4 years before?

But wait...the Wayback Machine has a sample image of form 4773 from 2001 where they ask, you got it, a question about race and ethnicity.

2001?  That was like 13 years ago, right?

So how badly is this sentence botched?

The Obama administration is mum on why, in 2012, it began requiring gun buyers to declare their ethnicity and race.

Pretty bad.  Anyone who claims to be a news gatherer at the Trib should feel more than a little embarrassed to be employed by an organization that can get something like this so damn wrong.

The Braintrust Needs To Learn To Read Better (Or Maybe Fitzgerald's Office Needs To Edit Better)

Take a look at what The Trib's braintrust posted this morning:

Lance: To Rich Fitzgerald. The Allegheny County chief executive appears to think that Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Islamics don't believe in God. That's the take-away from his opposition to a County Council proposal, defeated Tuesday, to post “In God We Trust” in the council's meeting room. Mr. Fitzgerald said that would send a message to non-Christians that they're not welcome. He didn't have many takers among that cohort.

I'll stipulate that the memo could have been a little cleaner grammatically.  For example, take a look at this passage:

One of the area in which we could do better is our diversity. It’s the reason that organizations like Vibrant Pittsburgh were created, the reason that Allegheny County become a “Welcoming County,” and the reason that we continue to participate in efforts and initiatives that express that we are a friendly community that welcomes everyone.

While it's a halfway decent use of anaphora in that second sentence, (notice the repeated use of the phrase "...the reason that..." to structure), the rest of the passage has a few minor errors.  For example, the first sentence probably should have read "One of the areas..." rather than "One of the area..." as the "One of..." directly asserts multiple areas of which "diversity" is one.  Interestingly, had the memo writer simply omitted "of the", the sentence would have worked very nicely indeed:

One area in which we could do better is our diversity.

See?  My guess is that in the memo writer's haste this error was made.

And then in the second phrase of the second sentence, the memo writer probably should have gone with the present perfect ("the reason that Allegheny County has become...") or maybe the simple past tense ("the reason that Allegheny County became...") rather than what's there ("the reason that Allegheny County become...").

Now, while I have the greatest respect for this essay by Stephen Fry and I admit that it's quite possible that I am committing the very pedantic snobbery he detests.  However, I'll rest my case on what Fry frizzles here:

No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of clarity almost never, ever holds water. Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. [Emphasis added.]

And then:

You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all. [Emphasis added.]

So why is this important?  Because of some less than clear writing in this sentence:

Support and passage of 8376-14 tells our residents and visitors that if they are Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Athiest, Muslim, Islamic or any other non-theistic group, they are not welcomed here.

The braintrust gets to absurdly assert teh goofie: that County Executive Rich Fitzgerald doesn't think that "Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and Islamics" believe in God.  The problem here is the word "other."  Does it mean that Jews, Hindus and so on are among "non-theistic" groups?  Or does it mean that they are separate from them?  Interestingly, had the memo writer ordered the list differently, the sentence would have worked very nicely, indeed:

Support and passage of 8376-14 tells our residents and visitors that if they are Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Islamic, Atheist or any other non-theistic group, they are not welcomed here.

See? By grouping it that way, it's clear who makes up the non-theistic groups are and who doesn't.

Context, convention and circumstance are all.

A little editing by the County Executive's office would have left the Trib braintrust little grammatical room to snark.

Special note to County Executive Rich Fitzgerald: It's spelled atheist and not athiest.

The Climate, The Trib, And The Fact-Free Zone

Yep.  The Tribune Review's editorial board is still trying to disuade its loyal readership of the established science.

Note to the braintrust: Simply repeating your past assertions won't ever make them true.

Here's what they're asserting as "facts" today:

But even the loudest clucking can't drown out contrary facts. U.S. temperatures haven't risen in a decade. Global temperatures have been flat for 17 years. Prior warming was within natural variability. The IPCC's main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, isn't a pollutant. And humanity's climate impact is negligible...

Let's take them one by one, shall we?

 U.S. temperatures haven't risen in a decade. 

Not true.  There are a couple of misleads here.  First being this: In a discussion of global temperatures, selecting out a small section of the planet's surface (the US) as an indicator of the global tendencies, is almost irrelevant.  In any case, according to NOAA, the US trend is upward.  Take a look at July's average temperatures for the last century or so.  That blue line is the upward trend for the United States:

Next sentence:

Global temperatures have been flat for 17 years.

This is also simply not true.  The Independent in the UK reported last February:

In a foreword to “Climate Change Evidence and Causes”, Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, say that climate change is now more certain than ever and that many lines of evidence point to human activity as the cause.

“The evidence is clear. However, due to the nature of science, not every single detail is ever totally settled or completely certain. Nor has every pertinent question yet been answered,” the two presidents say.

And then when asked about "the pause" here's the answer:

The report says there is no “pause” in global warming only a temporary and short-term slowdown in the rate of increase in average global surface temperatures in the non-polar regions which is likely to start accelerating again in the near future.

“Globally averaged surface temperature has slowed down. I wouldn’t say it’s paused. It depends on the datasets you look at. If you look at datasets that include the Arctic, it is clear that global temperatures are still increasing,”[Professor Tim Palmer of Oxford University, one of the report’s main authors] said.

And in the report itself when asked whether this recent slowdown means climate change has stopped, the answer given is:

No. Since the very warm year 1998 that followed the strong 1997-98 El Niño, the increase in average surface temperature has slowed relative to the previous decade of rapid temperature increases. Despite the slower rate of warming the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s. A short-term slowdown in the warming of Earth’s surface does not invalidate our understanding of long-term changes in global temperature arising from human-induced changes in greenhouse gases. [Emphasis added.]

And so on.  The science is clear and as Neil deGrasse Tyson said:

The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.

Simply repeating the same old selected evidence (there's been no warming since the '98 spike!) doesn't do anything to contradict any of the science.

Don't They Filter Out Obvious Untruths?

Diana West writes a column for the Tribune-Review.

She's responsible for all the columns written under her byline.  She wrote them, she owns them.

So in that case, she's a birther.  Though to be fair and as far as I know, that column was NOT published in the Tribune-Review.  But still, they publish the columns of a known birther.

Bad.  Bad Tribune-Review.  Bad dog.

Here's another one.  In her most recent column, published Friday August 29 and titled "Rush to judgment in Ferguson" Diana West writes:

Even the dark suits and American flags fail to obscure the 21st-century lynch mob at work. According to federal and state authorities, Wilson shot the 6-foot-4, 292-pound man multiple times for “racist” reasons. The other story out there is that Wilson fired as Brown charged him after having beaten Wilson to the point of fracturing his orbital socket and rendering the six-year veteran cop nearly unconscious.

The fractured eye-socket story?  She went with the fractured eye-socket story?

Wasn't that debunked more than a week before (on August 21)?

But let's take a look at this fake story, shall we?  Where did it come from?  For that we turn to Salon.com:

Perhaps the first shot in the right-wing news campaign to smear Michael Brown came in the form of a call to a conservative talk radio host Dana Loesch on Aug. 15. A caller who claimed to be a friend of Wilson’s — who would only identify herself as Josie — told Loesch that Brown had “bum rushed” officer Wilson, punched him in the face and tried to go for Wilson’s gun. Brown and his friend then walked away. Wilson pulled his gun and ordered Brown to stop. Brown turned around, taunted Wilson, then again “bum rushed” him. Wilson fired six shots, the last shot to Brown’s forehead. “Josie” claimed that she had gotten this information from a Facebook discussion. She did not claim that Wilson had been seriously injured in the encounter.

Much discussion and rampant speculation followed in the right-wing blogosphere, even though the only source was an anonymous caller to a radio show and a supposed Facebook discussion. Then, on Aug. 19, Jim Hoft, a St. Louis-based blogger, announced on his site Gateway Pundit that Wilson had suffered an “Orbital Blowout Fracture to Eye Socket.”

“The Gateway Pundit can now confirm from two local St. Louis sources that police Officer Darren Wilson suffered facial fractures during his confrontation with deceased 18 year-old Michael Brown. Officer Wilson clearly feared for his life during the incident that led to the shooting death of Brown. This was after Michael Brown and his accomplice Dorian Johnson robbed a local Ferguson convenience store.”

Hoft offered a still from a CT scan as evidence of Wilson’s injury. It did not take long for people to debunk the story. Later that afternoon on the website Little Green Footballs, Charles Johnson, who takes delight in debunking Hoft, shredded the story.

Johnson, for example, foiled the description of how painful a fractured orbital socket is with the video of Officer Wilson casually walking about the corpse of Michael Brown.  No ambulances were called for him, none of the officers gave him first aid and the X-Rays Holt posted at Gateway Pundit were stock images from the University of Iowa.

The story's false and yet Diana West still went with it and just as importantly, the Trib allowed onto its pages.

But let's take a look at West's description of "the other story out there" - that Wilson shot Brown 6 times after Brown beat him so badly he shattered the officer's eye socket and nearly rendered him unconscious.

Wow.  Does Diana West seriously think that makes any sense?  Any sense at all?

Does the Trib?

Subtle, Very Subtle

By now you should all have learned that Governor Corbett, behind in the polls by double digits and presumably in desperate need of an election year boost, has announced:

...that the state has secured agreement with the federal government to implement the portion of his Healthy Pennsylvania plan that will improve and bring financial stability to the state’s Medicaid program so that the state can increase access to quality, affordable health care through the private insurance market.

In the words of Kate Giammarise at the P-G:

Pennsylvania’s working poor could start receiving subsidized health insurance as early as Jan. 1 now that the federal government has approved the state’s proposed Medicaid overhaul.

Federal regulators approved much of Gov. Tom Corbett’s “;Healthy PA” plan, the state and federal governments confirmed Thursday, ending months of negotiations between the two parties. Enrollment in what’s being called the “Healthy PA Private Coverage Option” will begin Dec. 1.

Mr. Corbett’s plan, unveiled last year and formally submitted to the federal government for review in February, would not directly expand the state’s Medicaid program, but would instead offer federal subsidies to low-income Pennsylvanians to purchase private insurance. As many as 600,000 uninsured Pennsylvanians could be eligible, according to the state’s latest estimates.

Guv'mint subsidies?  Redistributing the wealth to help the poor?  That's a guv'mint take over of the economy!  Impeach Obama!

Give it time.  Give it time, for surely our friends in the Pennsylvania Tea Party will be screeching that very soon.

Back to reality.  While it's good news that hundreds of thousands of the states poor could be receiving subsidized health insurance soon, not everyone's happy with the deal.

From Pennlive.com:

"Today's agreement begins to dig Pennsylvania out of the hole Governor Corbett and lawmakers created when they rejected funding to expand health care coverage to half-a-million low-income Pennsylvanians. There never should have been a coverage gap in Pennsylvania, and we share the relief of hundreds of thousands of uninsured Pennsylvanians in knowing it's finally on track to close," said Antoinette Kraus, of the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, in a news release, referring to the fact that the coverage became available Jan. 1 in states that accepted the Obamacare version.

And from Michael Morrill of Keystone Progress:

"The Obama administration's approval today of 'Healthy Pennsylvania,' Governor Corbett's insurance industry giveaway, will leave thousands of working families without insurance unnecessarily. Because the Corbett administration refused to accept a simple expansion of the medicaid program, thousands in Pennsylvania have gone without insurance they so dearly need, and thousands will still be left out in the cold because the approved deal will create unaffordable premiums.

"There is no reason to give more money to the insurance companies when there was an easy alternative that would have used that money to directly aid the families that need it most -- expanding medicaid as 20+ other states have already done. Instead, the Corbett administration has decided to play politics with the health of thousands of Pennsylvanians in an effort to funnel millions of dollars into the pockets of wealthy insurance companies."

And our friends on the right must surely be unhappy as well. From Alex Nixon and Brad Bumsted of the Trib:

The conservative Commonwealth Foundation commended Corbett for pushing back against Medicaid expansion, but said he should “walk away” from the plan as approved.

“Given the federal government's unwillingness to grant Pennsylvania work search requirements or meaningful cost-sharing, it's in the best interest of Pennsylvanians to walk away and pursue other avenues to truly expand health care access,” the Harrisburg nonprofit said in a statement.

And there's the subtle.  That's the Tribune-Review, remember.  Which, via its editorial page, has denounced Obamacare forever.  Prior to his passing, Richard Mellon Scaife owned the Tribune-Review.  Prior to his passing, Scaife presided over a number of foundations.  Prior to his passing, those foundations gave lots of money to various conservative institutions over the years.

Turns out that about 35% of the foundational support received by the above mentioned Commonwealth Foundation came from those Scaife-controlled foundations - amd there's not a peep out of Nixon and Bumstead about all the money their former boss gave to the conservative institution they were quoting.

Subtle, very subtle.

Still, No Actual Science Here

And by "here" of course I mean the editorial page of the Tribune-Review.

Take a look at this warning about some upcoming legislation.  I want to jump all the way to the bottom to the "science" that supports the whole argument:

As Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute points out, atmospheric and surface warming began in the late 1970s and ended in the mid-to-late 1990s. In effect, the “Great Carbon Chase” is a nonstarter.

So who's this Benjamin Zycher of AEI?   (Let's not forget that AEI is itself a beneficiary of millions of Scaife money.) Is he a climate scientist?

Um, no. From his AEI bio page:

Ph.D., economics, University of California, Los Angeles
M.P.P., public policy, University of California, Berkeley
A.B., political science, University of California, Los Angeles

And what does this econ Ph.D. actually say about the carbon legislation?  Specifically the "science" about how the warming ended in the late 90s?

Take a look:

With respect to the explicit assumption about the "warming of our planet": The most recent warming period ended 15 or more years ago.

Ah, that argument.  The warming ended in the late 90s.  The "link" above is actually two links.  One leading to an actual scientist (Roy Spencer, Ph.D.) and the other leading to another non-scientist (Christopher Monckton) who is more or less a quack.

So let's look at the scientist.  He actually gets his own page at the Skeptical Science website.  (Actually, it's a page devoted to him, titled "Climate Misinformer: Roy Spencer).  And here's how Skeptical Science debunks Spencer's "no warming in x number of years" argument. I wrote only yesterday about how it's still warming outside (FYI - that's where the science points)

It's the same old selective evidence fallacy that's been used countless times before.

And the Trib is still using it.

A Question For Eric Heyl

Mr Heyl;

I see that, in June, the Tribune-Review published this interview you conducted with Stephen Moore, chief economist for The Heritage Foundation and a former writer for The Wall Street Journal in which you discuss Fed policy.

I don't know if you're aware but Heritage Foundation chief economist Moore was snagged getting some rather serious facts wrong - some requiring some rather serious corrections.

Here's what happened.  Mr Moore wrote this op-ed for the Kansas City Star (it was reprinted here at the Heritage Foundation website, in case you missed it).  But then he was on the losing end of a fact-check by the Star's Yael Abouhalkah:

The tax-cutting efforts of the embattled [Kansas Governor Sam] Brownback were praised in a recent opinion column by Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.

However, my research shows Moore used outdated and inaccurate job growth information at a key point in his article in early July.

And then:

The wrong data undermined one of Moore’s arguments — that low-tax states have shown tremendous job gains and that employment often doesn’t grow as strongly in high-tax states.

So what do Moore say that was incorrect?  In his op-ed, he wrote:

No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years; California, with its 13 percent tax rate, managed to lose jobs. Oops. Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops.

Turns out most of that was incorrect. From Abouhalkah's fact-check:

No. 1: When Moore wrote about job creation “over the last five years,” he told The Star that he had measured from December 2007 to December 2012, using federal Bureau of Labor Statistics information.

That was an odd and ultimately misleading decision for readers. The bureau’s data is updated monthly, so “the last five years” easily could and should have been from mid-2009 to mid-2014. That would have provided more up-to-date figures, not 18-month-old data.

No. 2: Texas did not gain 1 million jobs in that 2007-2012 period. The correct figure was a gain of 497,400 jobs.

No. 3: Florida did not add hundreds of thousands of jobs in that span. It lost 461,500 jobs.

No. 4: New York, which has one of the highest income tax rates, did not lose jobs during that time. It gained 75,900 jobs. [Bolding and Italics in original]

 Yea, that's some serious factual errors by your Mr Moore, huh?

Here's my question to you, Mr Heyl: While it's true that this set of factual errors had nothing to do with your interview with him, wouldn't it be rather unwise to ever invite Stephen Moore back onto the pages of the Tribune-Review, considering how much he managed to get wrong (and in such a small space, too!) on such an important topic (the link between tax rates and job creation)?

A Benghazi Debunking Follow-up

As I posted yesterday, Congressman Ruppersberger posted this on July 31:

The House Intelligence Committee spent nearly two years looking at every aspect of the Intelligence Community’s activities before, during and after the attacks of September 11, 2012...

Snip

This report shows that there was no intelligence failure surrounding the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens...

And so on.

Our friends at MediaMatters are reporting that Fox News is quiet about the report.  For a "news" service quick to pounce on any (ANY!) "smoking gun" report out of Darrell Issa's committee, it's interesting, is it not, that they haven't had much to say about a report debunking their ever evolving Benghazi mythos.

But then that got me to wondering.  How is the House Intelligence Committee report being reported on by our own conservative "news" source, the Tribune-Review?

You'll be surprised to learn, of course, that it's not all together different from what's not being said at Fox.

As of this writing there are three post-Ruppersberger (7/31/14) hits on the word "benghazi" at the Trib search engine.  Three.  And none of them reference the report.

There is this letter, on the other hand:

President Obama is attempting to shift attention from his scandals by attacking former President George W. Bush. I hope the American people don't fall for that trick.

If one considers waterboarding to be torture, then Bush allowed torture of Muslim terrorists.

After Sept. 11, 2001, America was under attack. How many American lives were saved and terrorist attacks foiled because we used waterboarding? Sometimes if you want to win, you must get your hands dirty.

I would like some answers to the scandals of the Obama administration. What happened to Lois Lerner's emails? Who ordered conservative groups audited? Who ordered the bugging of journalists? What really happened during the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11, 2012?

I'm sure Obama is trying very hard to bury those answers.

Actually, the Trib's readers would certainly know the answer to the Benghazi question if the paper they rely on for information actually reported on the House Intelligence Committee's report.

Which they haven't yet.

How surprising is that?

And We're Back To The Selective Evidence AGAINST The Reality

An embarrassingly typical "argument" against the Climate Science can be found in today's Tribune-Review:

Speaking of climate clucking, Western Pennsylvania broke records this week for summer cold. “What was that, honey? Why, yes, of course, I'll throw another log on the fire, baby — all that global warming is making it cold outside.” [Bolding in Original.]

As if the weather in one local area over a short time span is an indication of a global trend.

It isn't.

But I wonder if the Trib's editorial board would be issuing the exact same denial if they lived in Phoenix:

The official temperature in Phoenix hit 115 degrees at 1:32 p.m. on Thursday. That breaks the record of 114 degrees set in 2006. The high reached 116 degrees shortly after 2:15 p.m.

The overnight low on Thursday was 93 degrees. That also set a record.

Or Los Angeles:

Triple-digit heat scorched inland areas of Southern California on Wednesday as forecasters predicted that above-normal temperatures would continue into the weekend.

In the desert, Thermal hit 119 degrees, breaking a daily record of 118 degrees that was set in 2006. Palm Springs reached 116 degrees, tying a daily record that also was set in 2006, according to the National Weather Service.

As of 4 p.m. in Los Angeles County, Northridge, Saugus and Van Nuys each had hit 100 degrees. Acton and Lancaster topped out at 102, according to the weather service.

Or on Planet Earth:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that June was the globe’s warmest in 134 years of records following its report that May was also the hottest on record. These reports are feeding anticipation that 2014 could become the warmest year on record.

But, according to the scientifically illiterate editorial board of the Tribune-Review, none of that has any meaning because Allegheny County has been colder than usual for a few weeks.

So embarrassing wrong that it undermines the whole paper as a "news" source, doesn't it?

The Tribune-Review And (The Felon) Dinesh D'Souza

Back on May 20 of this year, this happened:

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza entered a guilty plea Tuesday to a charge that he used straw donors to make $20,000 in illegal contributions to Republican Senate candidate Wendy Long in 2012, officials said.

Politico goes on:

The single felony count D’Souza admitted guilt on carries a maximum prison sentence of two years, but the plea agreement D’Souza’s lawyers reached with the government says sentencing guidelines applicable to the case call for a sentence of 10 to 16 months.

And that makes him a felon.

That was two months ago.  A few days ago Media Matters published this. When I read the title of the piece, "Dinesh D'Souza's Political Friends Rally To His Defense", it got me to wondering how his case was covered by my own (local) favorite conservative news source, The Tribune-Review.

And you'll never ever guess what I found (and didn't find) there.

When you enter "Dinesh D'Souza" into the Trib's search engine, you'll find (at this writing) three articles published after he admitted to that felony that mention him and none mention his guilty plea.

But hey, maybe the Trib's website just publishes Trib content.  Maybe the news of D'Souza's guilty plea made it onto the physical pages of the paper (via, say, Reuters or the AP) while not making it onto the Trib's online version.

Maybe - but then how do you explain this?

Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative commentator and best-selling author, has been indicted by a federal grand jury for arranging excessive campaign contributions to a candidate for the Senate.

It's on the Trib's website AND it's from Reuters.

So they post online the news of D'Souza's indictment but not his guilty plea?

Gee, for a news source, they're certainly selective about how they cover (at least one) conservative pundit.

Um, I Think The Braintrust Left Something Out. Again.

From today's Tribune-Review:

The Obama administration might be painting a rosy picture of the federal deficit — the lowest thus far under Barack Obama's tenure — but the Congressional Budget Office is ringing the alarm bells. It reminds that the federal debt that today is 74 percent of the economy will explode to 106 percent by 2039. Spending and deficits must be curbed, the CBO warns. But, of course, that's anathema to “progressives,” who can't seem to wrap their brains around the Law of Diminishing Returns. [Bolding in original.]

But take a look at the report.  On page 5 (page 5!!) we read:

The unsustainable nature of the federal tax and spending policies specified in current law presents lawmakers and the public with difficult choices. Unless substantial changes are made to the major health care programs and Social Security, spending for those programs will equal a much larger percentage of GDP in the future than it has in the past. At the same time, under current law, spending for all other federal benefits and services would be on track to make up a smaller percentage of GDP by 2024 than at any point in more than 70 years. Federal revenues would also represent a larger percentage of GDP in the future than they have, on average, in the past few decades. Even so, spending would soon start to outpace revenues by increasing amounts (relative to GDP), generating rising budget deficits. As a result, federal debt held by the public is projected to grow faster than the economy starting a few years from now, and because debt is already unusually high relative to GDP, further increases could be especially harmful.

To put the federal budget on a sustainable path for the long term, lawmakers would have to make significant changes to tax and spending policies: reducing spending for large benefit programs below the projected levels, letting revenues rise more than they would under current law, or adopting some combination of those approaches. [Emphasis added.]

And what do you think "letting revenues rise more than they would under current law" could possibly mean?

The next page offers up an explanation.  In a discussion of two competing scenarios (do we do this sooner or later?) the CBO's authors use other language to describe what "letting revenues rise" means.  First the "sooner" scenario:

The sooner significant deficit reduction was implemented, the smaller the government’s accumulated debt would be, the smaller policy changes would need to be to achieve a particular long-term outcome, and the less uncertainty there would be about what policies would be adopted. However, if lawmakers implemented spending cuts or tax increases quickly, people would have little time to plan and adjust to the policy changes, and those changes would weaken the economic expansion during the next few years. [Emphasis added.]

And then the "later" scenario:

Reductions in federal spending or increases in taxes that were implemented several years from now would have a smaller effect on output and employment in the short term. However, waiting for some time before reducing federal spending or increasing taxes would result in a greater accumulation of debt, which would represent a greater drag on output and income in the long term and would increase the size of the policy changes needed to reach any chosen target for debt. [Emphasis added.]

Isn't it interesting how the braintrust, in informing its loyal readers about the impending budgetary doom described by the CBO, left out the part about the possibility of avoiding said doom by increasing taxes?

Yea, they want you to know the fullest picture possible of the CBO report.

A Scaife Follow-up. (Where's His Money Going?)

There's a pair of local articles (one in the P-G and the other in the Trib) describing where Richard Mellon Scaife's stuff is going to go, now that he's passed on.

The P-G has more info than the Trib but perhaps that's because the Trib's Mike Wereschagin is writing more about Scaife's art collection than about his estate.

We start with the Trib:

The wealth, land and art collections of Richard Mellon Scaife, the late owner of the Tribune-Review, will be distributed among two foundations, a trust, an art museum and a conservancy, according to his will.

And then:

The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg and Brandywine Conservancy near Philadelphia will split Scaife's art collection, according to the will. The will allows the organizations to decide how to divide the collection and sets up a rotating selection system to resolve disagreements.

That's certainly good news for those two art museums.

But let's try to follow the money.  Where is the money going?  This is where Wereschagin stumbles:

The Sarah Scaife Foundation and Allegheny Foundation will divide the assets Scaife inherited from his parents, according to the will. The value of the assets was not available. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, which gives to organizations that study public policy issues, donated $13.5 million in 2012, according to the foundation's most recent annual report available. The Washington-based American Enterprise Institute and Cambridge, Mass.-based Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis received the most money, at $600,000 and $760,000, respectively.

The Allegheny Foundation, whose giving supports historic preservation, civic development and education in Western Pennsylvania, donated $2.6 million in 2012, according to its most recent annual report. The largest gifts — $210,000 and $200,000 — went to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art and Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, respectively.

Ah, Mike. The two foundations are so much more than the borderline innocent with civic pride description you give us.  But let's take a look at the 2012 gifts.

You'll note that among the top 15 recipients there are a number of important conservative/free market institutions:

• The Hoover Institution ($409,000)
• The Claremont Institute ($400,000)
• The Heritage Foundation ($400,000)
• The Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation ($375,000)
• The Competitive Enterprise Institute ($300,000)
• The Hudson Institute ($250,000)

Include the money sent to AEI and Foreign Policy Analysis, and that gets you (by my count) about $3.5 million.  So if the total donated in 2012 was about $13.5 million and at least $3.5 million went to conservative think tanks (remember, I only looked at the top 15 recipients - out of 78), then that's a tad more than a quarter of the funds right there.

Given such a large chunk went to conservative think tanks, why not just say so?  Why omit that part?
It gets worse when you look at the Allegheny Foundation, which Wereschagin describes as "whose giving supports historic preservation, civic development and education in Western Pennsylvania".

Let's see who else the Allegheny Foundation gave money to in 2012.  On the list we find these profoundly non Pennsylvania historic preservation and civic development organizations:

• America's Survival ($150,000)
• David Horowitz Freedom Center ($150,000)
• Young America's Foundation ($150,000)
• Allegheny Institute for Public Policy ($125,000)
• The Institute of World Politics ($100,000)
• American Legislative Exchange Council ($50,000)

Why not mention any of that?  I mean the president of America's Survival is a man named Cliff Kincaid and on May 1 of this year, RightWing watch quoted Kincaid as saying:

...you cannot be a conservative in the traditional sense and be a homosexual, you cannot be a conservative in the traditional sense and promote homosexual marriage and all these other libertine and left-wing causes...

Then there's the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  In late June RightWingWatch reported:

Yesterday on NewsMax TV, David Horowitz said that President Obama is intentionally destroying America and Israel, but no one dares to criticize him “because he’s black.”

“Obama is the Manchurian candidate, he represents America’s enemies and he has just cut us off at the knees,” he said. “He’s a traitor, you have to look at Obama as a traitor, he supports the enemy.”

And did you see the last bullet point on that list?  ALEC.

So perhaps we have a reason why that stuff went unmentioned.

But do not tell us that The Allegheny Foundation is best (or even accurately) described with this phrase, "whose giving supports historic preservation, civic development and education in Western Pennsylvania."

Just don't do it.  It insults our intelligence.

O'Toole and Silver do a better job over at the P-G:

The will steers Scaife’‍s art, his late mother’s real estate, and stock trusts that she left behind to various charities. It indicates the existence of two trust funds, one of which appears to be tied to the Tribune-Review newspapers.

And then:

The will also mentions, but does not detail, an irrevocable trust created in 2004 which includes among its five trustees at least three people involved with the Tribune-Review: Mr. Gutnick, former Tribune-Review president Edward H. Harrell and Trib Total Media CEO Ralph J. Martin.

Something else left out of the Trib's coverage.  Go figure.

The Trib Misleads The Climate Science. Again.

From today's Thursday Wrap at the Tribune-Review:

More bad news for the First Church of Global Warming. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a federal agency, mind you, reports that temperatures in the United States have not risen over the last decade. In fact, they've fallen. And that coincides with overall planetary temperature stagnation over the past 17 years, reports Rick Moran, writing in the American Thinker. Old farmers likely are making plans to put up a few extra cords of wood for the winter. [Bolding in Original.]

Sooo many misleads here.  It's a selective use of the data that brings the braintrust to this incorrect place.  Again.

We can start with the fact that they're using "temperatures in the United States" as a guide to global temperatures.  When NOAA (that same federal agency they're citing, mind you) posts this about global warming:

Temperatures measured on land and at sea for more than a century show that Earth's globally averaged surface temperature is experiencing a long-term warming trend.

They even have a chart showing the data:

Now go back and look at what the braintrust wrote.  Notice how given the long term frame of reference their shorter terms ("the last decade" and "17 years") what they wrote can be both accurate (in the short term) and not at all true (in the long term).

If you start and end with the el Nino year of 1998 it certainly looks like a tapering off (and perhaps even a "cooling") but when taken as a whole, the localized trends become less important than the overall trend.  Which is warming.

This is a typical mislead from the science denying Trib braintrust.  It's cooler now (6:18am) than it will be 6 hours from now - does that mean the planet is cooling?  Of course not.  But that's their argument right here right now.

Not only that, but the data that the braintrust cites is for surface temperatures.  As NOAA explains:

Just because the global surface temperature has not risen significantly in the past decade doesn't mean the Earth's heat energy imbalance has vanished, though. Excess heat energy trapped by greenhouses gases can have more than one fate in the Earth system; among other things, it can cause water to evaporate, it can melt ice, and it can be mixed into the deep ocean by overturning currents.

That mixing coupled with water's naturally large heat capacity makes the global ocean the Earth’s biggest absorber of heat; scientists estimate the ocean absorbs more than 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases. When analyzing temperature patterns at different depths of the ocean, scientists observed that deep ocean temperatures—measured more than a half-mile down from the surface—began to rise significantly around 2000, while shallower waters warmed more slowly. This divergence took place at the same time that a natural climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, was shifting to a negative phase.

So not only where they selective about the area (the contiguous USA vs the globe) in misleading you, their reading public, but they were selective in what data they used (surface temps vs water temps).

See how much do they have to mislead for their story to be accurate?

What does that tell you about their story?